A Round-Up of Our Recent Projects

Since finishing up the dining room renovation, we haven’t had a big project going on in our house. It’s been refreshing to not have paint cans and tools cluttering up my countertops or an in-progress room that I spend my days trying to keep kids out of. While we’ve been in-between big projects in our home, we’ve been working on helping my friend Amber create a cookie decorating space in her home, as well as tackling several smaller projects that have been on our to-do list for a while.

Big, huge room renovations are fun, but the little details that make up a home can have huge impact. Today I thought I’d share the four projects we completed over the past few weeks – they were all easy to do, relatively inexpensive, and took anywhere from a couple hours to a couple days to finish. They may be smaller scale projects, but they went a long way in upgrading a few spaces in our home!

Paint the Front Door

The previous owners had painted the front door the same color as the wall. This was never my favorite design choice to begin with, but once we painted the walls, the door definitely stuck out like a sore thumb! Justin and I plan to eventually replace this with a double door, but for now I just gave it a couple coats of Sherwin Williams Tricorn Black. A small and simple change that made a big difference!

Upgrade our Dog Bowls

We had the same dog bowl setup for years and to say it left something to be desired is an understatement. I bought the mat way back when we only had Macie, so it was only big enough to place one water bowl and one food dish on top. I’m honestly not sure why we never upgraded the mat to a bigger size once Scout joined our family! Scout did have a matching ceramic food bowl but it broke and we replaced it with a metal one, and LJ dropped a heavy toy on the water bowl and took a big chip out of the rim. Suffice to say, the whole thing was a hot mess. Using this $159 raised dog bowl as inspiration, Justin used scrap wood and simple stainless steel pet bowls to create a new setup. I love how clean and streamlined it looks!

Create Gallery Walls

Once the main floor walls were freshly painted, there were a few areas that really needed some personality. Using a mix of frames I’ve collected from various thrift stores, I created two gallery walls: one in between our kitchen and living room and one on the two walls next to our spiral staircase. You can read more about the process for how I curated each wall in this blog post.

Update Playroom Window Trim

The playroom (formerly a dining room) was the first room we updated after moving in to this house. At that time, I wasn’t sure what my plan was going to be for the trim in the house, so we left the baseboards and window casing alone. I haven’t loved the wood trim look so I was excited to finally update the window trim here! Justin followed the same process he used when updating the office and dining room window trim, and I painted the windows Sherwin Williams Tricorn Black and the trim Benjamin Moore Greyhound (the same color as the walls). I love the new look!

I’m still debating on whether or not to paint the baseboards as well. We plan to replace the baseboards, but we also plan to update the carpet once we’re out of the toddler stage (they’re too messy right now to justify new flooring, ha!) So should I wait to replace the baseboards and just paint them for now? Or should I go ahead and replace them? I can’t decide!

Now that these little projects are wrapped up, I’m very excited for what’s coming up next! We have a small project we’re doing for someone else this weekend, and we also have plans to finally show some love to a *very* neglected room. I can’t wait to share more soon!